Dust And Desire

She came to sell the house. Someone else already had a key.

Emily Carter has eight weeks. Renovate her great-aunt's cottage, list it, and be back in Seattle before the partnership vote she's spent thirteen years earning.

Then she walks into the front room and finds it already taken apart. Every board pulled and numbered in pencil. Tools laid out on the sill. And a master carpenter standing in the doorway with a signed commission, a key, and a claim on the house that started long before Emily's did.

Sophie Bennett has spent five years keeping a dying town's craft alive on her own. She doesn't ask for help. She has never once asked anybody to stay. And she absolutely does not need the girl who left, back for eight weeks with a listing date and a return address.

But the permit is in Sophie's name. Emily can't sell without her. Sophie can't finish without Emily. So they sign, and they set the terms, and neither of them notices she has just arranged eight weeks of standing very close to somebody in a very small house.

Sawdust. Long days. Cold mornings and a woman who knows exactly what her hands are doing.

Emily has an answer for every question except the only one that matters — what happens on the twelfth of June.

And there's a letter in her bag she hasn't mentioned to anyone.

For readers who like their small towns warm, their women competent, and the bedroom door wide open.

In this book:

✦ Forced proximity, one house, no escape ✦ Slow burn into seriously steamy ✦ Only one permit ✦ Opposites attract — her precision, her patience ✦ Small-town found family and a whole street with opinions ✦ A guaranteed sapphic happily-ever-after

Dust & Desire is a full-length standalone sapphic romance. No cheating, no cliffhanger, and a happily-ever-after you can count on.

It's the first of eight in Women of Juniper Ridge, a mountain town where the mill is closed, everybody's arguing about what to do with it, and nobody has been able to keep a secret since 1912.